Currently, when you are watching a site, the notication e-mail about a wiki page modification is very bare; it only contains a link to the webpage itself, and the name of the author which modified the page.
My wish is that the e-mail would contain the whole page modification diff, so that the watcher can quickly review what it is going one. It could use HTML in the e-mail to achieve the same coloured diff that is seen on the website. Alternatively, a normal unified diff would be great.
Alternatively (or in addition), the link contained in the e-mail should actually link to the webpage with the difference open at the bottom (just like when you click on History and then click to review the latest change). This would at least make easier to review what it is going on.
As they are implemented now, the notification e-mails are worth only for really small and seldom modified wikis. On larger sites, the flood of useless e-mails with basically no content is too hard to bare.
Add-on: it would be great if, instead of sending a notification immediately, the server would batch subsequent modifications to the same webpage. In my experience, an author usually works on a webpage doing several modifications and small tweaks one after another. This results in one "semantic" modification gathering together 4-5 "syntactic" modifications.
It would be great if watchers only received one e-mail instead of 5 of them. One way to implement it would be to delay the notification by 5-10 minutes and, if a new modification by the same author happened during the wait time, wait another 5-10 minutes. This way, watcher would receive a single e-mail (containing a single global diff).
Rasky: this is how page edits are handled, the notification is sent after 5 edit, but if page is edited in those 5 minutes the notification for THAT edit is not sent, and is sent for THIS edit in next 5 minutes unless there's another edit, etc.
So you only get notification if page was edited and is not edited for at least 5 minutes.
Piotr Gabryjeluk
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OK thank you! So scrap this additional comment :)
But if you wanted a diff for the modification, then you would need to remember the page state before all the notifications that have not been sent. Otherwise, no matter how extensive the initial edit, the diff would only show the final inconsequential syntax fix.
right now the email notifications contain pretty much zero useful information except a link to the page and the username. as an admin that has a ton of pages that i am maintaining across a few different sites, it is really hard to keep on top of what is changing in my wiki. furthermore, i *do* have a good idea of what is on each page. after all, these are my sites that i care deeply about.
please consider adding this feature, it would really make wikidot really awesome for content creators.
the diff functionality is already implemented. all i want is for that code to make it into the notification email. pretty please?